Friday, February 13, 2009

Friday Floor Plan Porn

SELLER: Marshall and Maureen CoganLOCATION: Fifth Avenue, New York, NYPRICE: $25,500,000SIZE: Big. 2 bedrooms, 4.5 bathroomsDESCRIPTION: ...Glorious vistas are enjoyed in the sprawling living room as well as the corner library which also features a southern exposure with views down Fifth Avenue; both have wbfpl's. The 17.9 x 15.5 foot formal dining room offer true elegance for entertaining. The private rooms are beautifully designed for privacy and repose...

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: We thought we would start the morning and end the week with a little New York City floor plan porn for the children to swoon and salivate over. A few months ago, septuagenarian financier and bizness bigwig Marshall Cogan foisted his two bedroom Fifth Avenue co-operative apartment on the market with a fair amount of fanfare and a knee buckling asking price of $40,000,000. No puppies, that is not one of Your Mama's typical typos...that's forty million clams for a two bedroom apartment.

The listing soon disappeared but recently popped back up with a much reduced but still staggering asking price of $25,500,000. Although it appears to have been around 1994, unfortunately we do not know when exactly when Mister and Missus Cogan purchased the 6th floor apartment, nor do we have any idea what the couple paid for the place. None the less, it's probably safe to assume it was far, far less than the current asking price.

Listing information reveals that the colossal Cogan crib contains just two bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms plus an additional staff bedroom and bathroom tucked into the northeast corner of the unit. And what bedrooms they are, children. The good-sized guest room includes its own marble private pooper and the vast master suite is composed of a small foyer leading to a large bedroom, two separate and custom designed dressing rooms lined with built in closets and cabinetry and two roomy marble and onyx bathrooms, one of which includes the all important bidet for the modern art luvin' Missus Cogan.

A peep and perusal of the floor plan shows the public rooms include a private elevator landing opening to a central foyer which acts as a central traffic hub for the entire apartment. A small but windowed powder room is well located off the foyer and down a short hallway for privacy and aeration. The living room and corner library, each with a wood burning fireplace, together stretch a full 45 feet and have three gigantic windows over looking Central Park and fourth windowin the Anigre wood paneled library that looks south down the bizzy lanes of Fifth Avenue.

A decent sized dining room is separated from the all white kitchen by a big butler's pantry and a closet lined hallway leads from the kitchen to a small office, laundry room and the staff suite. A back entrance into one of the dressing rooms in the master bedroom is also located off the back hallway which allows for the house gurl to draw a hot bath in the morning without disturbing the slumbering ladee (or gent) of the house.

Other dee-luxe amenities, according to listing information, include through wall air conditioning, an humidification system, remote operated blinds and an ultra violet air cleaning system which sounds pretty damn fancy to Your Mama.

As we often do when discussing high priced Upper East Side aeries, Your Mama requested a quick consult with the The Social Butterfly who told us she thinks–but isn't positive–the Cogan's dignified sprawler was all done up by interior decorator Jed Johnson. It would certainly make sense. While the day-core may not be particularly thrilling, it is none the less perfectly "correct" in the manner of the late Jed Johnson. Plus, Mister and Missus Cogan's former house on Pond Lane in Southampton was definitely did pretty by J.J. and appeared in all its glory on the glossy pages of Architectural Digest in June of 1997.

Now go grab a soda babies because Your Mama is gonna digress in order to provide a brief run down for all those folks not familiar with Mister Johnson's rather fascinating biography. A young Mister Johnson and his twin brother Jay moved to New York City in 1967 and were quickly swept up into the wacky and wonderful world of Andy Warhol. Mister Johnson started out as the floor sweeping boy at Warhol's famed Factory and later directed Warhol's film Bad as well as edited several other of Warhol's marvelously tacky movies. Some say J.J. and Warhol were boyfriends–they did, after all, reportedly live together for a dozen years–but it's just so hard for us to imagine the twitchy and bewigged artist being romantic let alone doing the dirty with anyone. Anyhoo, whatever the case, Mister Johnson began his gilded career doing up the day-core at Warhol's East 66th Street townhouse–currently owned by Hollywood honcho Tom Freston–and went on to work his stuff for other big name and deep-pocketed folks like Mick Jagger and publishing magnate Peter Brant and his then wife Sandy (who, incidentally, are the people who bought Warhol's Interview magazine after his death).

Mister Johnson's wild ride through New York City's hedonistic and glamorous intersection of Art and Money met its untimely end when he had the great misfortune of being a passenger on the doomed TWA Flight 800 that went down off the coast of Long Island in 1996. However, his legacy carries on through his eponymous design firm Jed Johnson Associates which is run by his brother Jay and design director Arthur Dunnam. Mister Dunnam was schooled in the office of the late and great decorator Billy Baldwin whose somewhat florid yet superbly restrained work still inspires the next generations of pillow fluffers and furniture fixers, so it goes without saying that he knows how to do the day-core like nobody's bizness.

Although The Social Butterfly says that 810 Fifth Avenue is a "good" building with just one reasonably large apartment per floor, it is not as "fabulous" as 834 Fifth, 4 E. 66th Street, 2 E. 67th Street or 820 Fifth which she claims offers just one (approx.) 9,000 square foot behemoth per floor. None the less, the residents of 810 include some very well established folks like financier Felix Rohatyn, swank socialite Jan Cowles and banking baron William vonMueffling of LazardFrere to name just a few. Former residents include William Randolph Hearst Jr., shamed U.S. president Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller (and a couple of his wives), and billionaire David Geffen who picked up the duplex penthouse in early 2006 for $31,500,000, never moved in and then flipped it at a substantial profit to Blackstone Group's Pete Peterson in mid-2007 for $37,500,000. So, while The Social Butterfly may say it's not a top tier building–and it very well may not be in the heavily nuanced, seriously competitive and notoriously persnickety world of Upper East Side co-operative real estate–but, you know, it's not exactly filled with high society rejects either.

I'm perusing all the ART in that damn place looking for the Remington Etchings that mysteriosly changed into terrible copies in the Remington Room of The '21' Club, during the reign of terror that was in the late 1980's early 90's when Mr. Cogan bought, ran and redid the famed New York hot spot. Maureen Cogan apparently loved her some Remington's as well as a humungous emerald ring that she loved to flash and whisper it's price tag to anyone within ear shot. Must be hiding in one of those numerous closets...

very Larry Tate meets The Shining. i like the subdued palette, but the whole double bathroom/double dressing room/maid walking thru the closet/hallway/office area really irks me for some reason. i can appreciate the correctness of it all. the foyer reminds me of the confessionals in my childhood church and i love that marble tub, i think because the color of the marble is the exact same color as the marble on the altar of said childhood church! : / weird.

I've never understood the need for (over) twice as many bathrooms as you have bedrooms, but then again, I am just middle class. As such, I don't understand the diff between a 'dressing area' and a 'dressing room.' For that, I blame my damn my middle-class-less-ness. Hmmph.

I wonder how many original bedrooms were removed to create the vast master dressing areas and bathrooms? My guess would be two. I'm fascinated by floor plans like this that include all sorts of ways for the help to scurry about unseen. This apartment is beautiful and I love how the paneling is detailed...simplicity = elegance.

Anon 12:05.........for even more fascination about keeping the staff unseen, you may want to check out the elaborate measures Julius Berwind took at his house, The Elms, in Newport, Rhode Island. He had all the bases covered.....from a wisteria covered arch over the delivery drive to hidden hallways....he and Horace Trumbauer thought of everything.

For the life of me I don't understand why people who can pay 25-40 million for a NY city apartment don't take the dough and go live somewhere really lovely, like on the Italian riviera, or the Dalmatian coast. If they have to live in NYC, I'd say they are enslaved, even in a $40 million apartment.

I love the apartment, but after looking at the pics a second time, it is really the late great Jed Johnson's design work I appreciate. So tasteful and understated, he was a great talent.

I know it's Fifth Avenue, but is anyone going to pay $25m for this apartment, in this market? Then again 40 reduced to 25 million is the sound of NYC real estate falling back to earth. How low will it go?

This is rather middle-of-the-road tasteful.That said, I still don't understand why the bulk of these interiors, in these 'up market spaces' strive to look like some ideal image from the past.This needs a shot of 'contemporary' now.

However, where does the maid take a shit? That bathroom has a sink and a shower...where is the terlit? Does the poor dear honestly have to schlep all the way to the bathroom off the foyer to let 'er rip?

About the maid's toilet, hmmm, you think maybe they just forgot to put in the floor plan? I'd venture to guess it's really there in real life.

As for the hallways, there is one - and it's short, just off the foyer, leading the two bedrooms and kitchen. That's it, because this is one giant 2 BR apt!

I'm pretty sure this originally had 4 bedrooms and a bunch of servants rooms. This is what I call a "fuck it!" apartment, where someone buys a big, family kind of apartment, renovates the hell out of it, and turns it into the ultimate couple's apartment. These people were/are used to having plenty of space and probably used almost every inch of it, except for the 2nd bedroom, which was for guests and was probably never used, but you do need one.

I don't love all the furniture, but the architecture is great. I could move in there easily. Prices of 2 years ago were all out of whack, so it's hard to know what this is really worth. If it sells soon, we'll know,

For the life of me I don't understand why people who can pay 25-40 million for a NY city apartment don't take the dough and go live somewhere really lovely, like on the Italian riviera, or the Dalmatian coast. If they have to live in NYC, I'd say they are enslaved, even in a $40 million apartment.''____

Can't we say the same thing about Los Angeles?

Why don't all rich people of the world run to the Dalmatian coast to buy real estate?